I wanted to throw this into the fire if I may. We acquired a Mac Studio M2 Max with 64 GG RAM and a 500 GB drive. This wasn't mean to really be a workstation, but to control our server and be an occasional workstation. Anyway, a decently powered system nonetheless. I have a simple scene with three products (a deodorant stick, a tube and a small spray) set up in Corona. Simple materials and graphic for the labels. Renders look amazing as usual. A couple of lights and one EXR in the Corona Sky object. Just three object with nothing else. I rendered an image at 4k, 15 passes and Intel Denoise. It will be delivered in a video at HD. I don't think I can show the image here though, yet.
This one frame took 3 min. 23 sec. on my 2017 iMac Pro with 18 cores. Not too bad. I will have 3 to 5 seconds to render. So I rendered this same frame on the M2 Max. expecting at least a 30% time reduction. It rendered in 3 min. and 40 sec.! What in the hell is that about? I was expecting 3 min., maybe 2 min. 30 sec. on this new box, based on my other testing.
I rendered the C4D Grapes scene I like to do for simple CPU speed and got 2 min. 37 sec. for the M2 Max. The same iMac Pro got 3 min. 19 sec.
Looks like Corona doe not take advantage of the new chips, as others have been complaining about. So disappointing. I'm rendering at 2017 speeds.
I mean the new features are great and all, but the real selling point is fast rendering. Either Chaos isn't supporting the Mac fully, or Apple isn't providing the dev support to Chaos. It's a mystery.